A new approach for interfacing SystemC-AMS models with hardware-emulated platforms

Since its introduction, SystemC-AMS extensions to SystemC have been used in several applications to model the analog part of a heterogeneous SoC. In this case, the SoC is usually a pure simulation model where the digital part is modeled using SystemC. If an emulation verification environment is used, the digital part of the SoC would be running on the emulator while the analog part, modeled with SystemC-AMS, would be running on the emulator host machine. In this paper, we propose an approach to interface SystemC-AMS models running on the emulator host machine with digital models running on the emulator. The interfacing challenge, addressed by this approach, lies in the fact that SystemC-AMS is a timed environment with a time wheel completely independent from the emulation time wheel. We also describe a case study that demonstrates the validity of the proposed approach.